


The Nightmare

by FirebirdsDaughter



Category: Ultraman R/B, ウルトラシリーズ | Ultra Series
Genre: Disappearances, Gen, Nightmares, Wow, am i radical?, but no seriously am actually the first, fear of people disappearing, i've never been first at anything, is this really the first Ultraman R/B fic on here?, maybe that's not the best word, references to the possibility of death/losing someone, slight agnstiness, yes this is inspired by that episode of TNG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-02 02:22:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15786984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirebirdsDaughter/pseuds/FirebirdsDaughter
Summary: Every now and then, Isami has the Nightmare.





	The Nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> Is this... Am I really the first person to post an Ultraman R/B work on here? I feel like that can't be right... Surely there's been someone else. There's probably stuff on other sites, too. I can **not** be the first person to **write** fic for R/B.  
>  Well, here this is anyway, I guess. Just a little emo one-shot about Isami having a recurring nightmare. I'm certain I'll be getting into much more dramatic stuff later with these boys, I love them.  
> And who knows, maybe I'll even update some of my other stuff!  
> ...  
> Hah hah. Maybe when my brain slows down or hell freezes over. Whichever comes first.

     Even now, every so often, Isami has the Nightmare.

     Not ‘a’ nightmare, not ‘some’ nightmare. **The** Nightmare. The **only** Nightmare.

     It had first come the night their mother disappeared, though at the time he’d been too young to clearly remember it. As he got older, though, it became recurring. Not every night, but every few weeks it would seep it’s way back in to his sleep—always just when he was finally recovering from the last time, too.

     He tried to think about it logically, to analyse the conditions surrounding each incident, but he’d been unable to determine a regular pattern. There didn’t seem to be a usual trigger.

     Sometimes it seems like it’s the way the whole place is dead silent when he works late and everyone else is in bed.

     Sometimes it could be the fading of their father’s footsteps when he disappears upstairs.

     Sometimes it might be the way the fringes of Asahi’s hair vanish around the corner when she leaves for school.

     Sometimes it feels like it’s Katsumi’s back when he goes out for the occasionally evening jog.

(And, more recently, sometimes it appears to be the way his brother disappears into light when Ultraman Rosso’s transformation time runs out.)

     But it never seems to be anything predictable. Never anything he can quantify. Never anything that makes sense. And the Nightmare persists nonetheless, like some incurable medical condition or a scientific anomaly that can’t be explained.

     And he hates it. He hates that he can’t study it and find a solution. He hates that he can’t reason it away. He hates that it still scares him.

     The worst part is that it starts out normal.

     Just an ordinary weekend day in the shop, with Asahi bugging him to eat breakfast while Katsumi tries desperately to get their father to stop hanging up tee-shirts with bad puns on them. Sometimes someone will stroll by outside. And, for a time, that’s all it is; for long enough that if he were aware, he’d start to feel at ease.

     Yes, the first part of the dream is always completely normal. It’s what happens next that haunts him in the daylight hours.

     His family starts to disappear.

     Without fail, their father goes first. Thinking about it while conscious, the best reason he could come up with was that it was just that, after the incident with their mother, his subconscious is more inclined to associate parents with absence than others. But that’s just a theory. Everything is different when he’s inside the Nightmare, and he turns around and their father’s not there. When he begs Asahi and Katsumi to tell him what happened, and they both just stare at him in bewilderment and deny any knowledge of their parent—of **either** parent. Once he remembered his dream self asking Asahi where they could have come from without parents. _I don’t know_ , she’d answered blithely, _I just kinda assumed we ‘were_. _’_

     Asahi is invariably next, anyway. One moment he’ll be talking to her upstairs, trying to show her the room that was their parents’, only to find it empty, then he’ll turn the corner of the hall and then she just won’t be there anymore. Vanished completely into nothing without a trace, and all evidence of her existence going with her. Even her bowl of candy will be gone from the counter. And when he’s in the Nightmare and doesn’t know it’s not real, he’s finally panicking and trying to make Katsumi **remember** them and also just **stay** with him, because even in a dream he’s smart enough to guess what’s going to happen next.

     Because Katsumi is always last. He doesn’t know why. The best answer he has is just that, simply due to age, he’s spent more time with Katsumi than with Asahi. That, for some reason, maybe that makes his elder brother being the final one to vanish, to leave him completely alone, just hurts that much more. He’s not convinced of that, thinks it would be agony regardless of who it was, but it’s the best he’s been able to come up with. Besides, what really doesn’t help is that in the end, Katsumi always believes him. He watches his little brother wander around and sob and hyperventilate and talk to fast and trip over his words, and at some point, he always steps in, puts his hands on Isami’s shoulders and earnestly says _I believe you_. Then when Isami is slightly calmer, he moves his hands and holds out a fist to do their little handshake. But then a truck will go by, or something will fall, or Isami will blink, and…

     And when he looks back, Katsumi is gone, too.

     And then he just sinks to the floor, and cries or trembles himself awake.

     Sometimes it seems to take hours. Sometimes a few minutes. But the pain keeps going. Because when he’s in the Nightmare, everything is real. Because even after he wakes up, every time he closes his eyes, or looks at one of them, he has to wonder if this moment or the next will be the last time he ever sees one of his family members.

     He thought becoming an Ultraman would help. That being Ultraman Blu would somehow change him, make him stronger, help the Nightmare go away.

     But he always ends up thinking about how Katsumi has been injured shielding him twice now. How much each strike hurts, even when they’re huge. How it feels when the light in his chest starts blinking. How Koma-nee got hurt. And he realises again and again how dangerous this whole thing truly is.

     And suddenly, for the first time since the time just after their mother disappeared, he can’t dismiss the Nightmare as lingering trauma he needs to live with. Suddenly, it’s real again. Suddenly, it’s not just a haunting dream.

     Suddenly, he has to consider the possibility that one day, he might  **actually** lose his brother out there.

     So now, a little more often, Isami has the Nightmare.


End file.
